Keep a programming language backwards compatible vs. fixing its flawsAlso, PHP has been slowly deprecating functionality with every single release - and a LOT of stuff breaks as a result. Unfortunately, PHP's stuck in a difficult spot where they have a hard time even producing deprecation warnings in a way that developers will see that won't end up disrupting sites anyway.

Unwritten rules of rewriting another team member's codeYep, I've learned from experience that some developers can get extremely agitated if you even fix bugs in their code without asking. Of course, this was on a project with no issue tracking or task planning, and I'm amazed it ever even shipped.

Is it any good to use binary arithmetic in a C++ code like “C style”?Today, C compilers are smart enough to optimize a*2 into a<<1 where appropriate. There's no need to refer to that as "the C style" - that is really more "the low-level assembly coder from the 1980s writing C" style. (Also, these days, mul is generally just as fast as shl, and in some cases could be faster. Don't try to out-optimize the compiler based on possibly-antiquated knowledge.)

Why was Tanenbaum wrong in the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debates?Also regarding part 2, the various x86 modernizations actually go a few steps beyond RISC and do some fascinating stuff with "micro-operations" internally which give even better scheduling flexibility with on-the-fly instruction reordering, which brings performance boosts that are far beyond what RISC adherents can even dream about. RISC CPUs could get that too but at this point you're not comparing RISC vs. CISC, you're comparing various in-hardware JIT strategies with fairly abstract ISA frontends.